


Love is a wish your disgruntled (future) boyfriend makes

by shetlandowl



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Regency, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - World War II, Dubious Consent, Excuse my French, Homophobic Language, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 04:03:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13426416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shetlandowl/pseuds/shetlandowl
Summary: Tony wakes up to a world he doesn't recognize, to a life he doesn't want, with someone he really can't stand. How much worse could it possibly get?





	Love is a wish your disgruntled (future) boyfriend makes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishipallthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishipallthings/gifts).



> Happy birthday, ishipallthings!! You're a dear friend, and you're part of what makes this fandom such a joy to be in. Thank you for all of your support and help with all of these nutty stories I cobble together, I really wouldn't have gotten half as far without your help.

It was a calm, crisp winter night when Pepper came back to the apartment.

Too calm.

“Tony?” Pepper called into the apartment and let the door quietly fall shut behind her. “Tony, are you home?"

She didn’t find him in their living room, or on the floor of their kitchenette, where he sometimes gravitated to indulge in the cooler air seeping out of the fridge. She tiptoed through to the only bedroom in the apartment, but he wasn’t in his (or her) bunk.

The last remaining room in their apartment was the bathroom, and, inevitably, that was where she found him, stretched out in the dry tub, fully dressed with his headphones over his ears, blasting music while he worked.

She padded over quietly, taking care to gently touch his shoulder so she wouldn’t startle him. Somehow, it worked: he didn’t startle. He didn’t even budge. She nudged him again, calling his name, but it wasn’t until she plucked the headphones off one of his ears that Tony noticed her.

“How’s it looking?” she asked, because after two days of dedicated frenzy, Tony had been spending his free time on only one thing.

“I misspelled functionality,” Tony croaked. Pepper glanced down at her to-go cup of cold coffee dredges, hesitating for only a moment before passing it to him. It was gross, but he accepted it readily, choking it down. It had been ten hours or more since he last thought about food, and his body was slowly retaliating.

“Overall?”

“Overall, it’s—uh,” he struggled to find the words. “You know Rogers. People that smart and good-looking have never had a rough day in their life. Nobody says no to them, and nothing is ever good enough.”

“He’ll never find a better technical writer than you, Tony,” Pepper promised. “You know he knows it. Why do you think he has your hands in everything that matters to the company?”

“Because I’m analytical and neurotic,” Tony pointed out. “Nobody does numbers faster or better, and—”

“Stop it, Tony,” she chided, and finally sat down on the tiled floor next to the cracked old bathtub. “You’re the best assistant a man in his position could hope for, and at the end of the day, he’s a businessman. He’s a fool if he doesn’t offer you that promotion soon.”

“He’s denied me before,” Tony reminded her, staring ahead at the dull screen of his laptop to avoid Pepper’s pitying expression. “Last year. He said I was inexperienced, ungrateful. As if I don’t pay attention, as if I don’t work twice as hard as anyone else—”

“They’re not honest people, Tony,” Pepper gently interrupted, because there was little comfort anyone could offer him after the way that meeting had crashed and burned, and then gone on to eat its teammates on a deserted Andean mountainside out of desperation. “Remember what Dr. Strange said about businessmen? It would take magic for them to be honest with you.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Even I watched Disney movies growing up, Pep. That’s never what magic does,” he grumbled. “All magic ever achieves is worse—whatever that shrink thinks he knows about “magic,” it doesn’t float around, happy and sweet like a stoned panda bear, looking to help me out. There’s always a catch.”

“Maybe all magic isn’t as bad as you think,” she tried again, but then changed her approach. “Besides, magic is preparation meeting opportunity.”

Tony raised a skeptical brow at her snap-bite of wisdom. “Yeah, sure, Oprah. I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“Then would you mind going to bed? Where magic supposedly happens?” Pepper wondered, if a little impatiently. “Some of us would like to use the shower for its intended purpose.”

***

When Tony woke up the next morning, he enjoyed approximately twelve seconds of peace before realizing that something was wrong. Many things, in fact, were wrong.

He felt well-rested. That never happened.

The alarm was not ringing. He rarely woke up without it.

Neither his arms or legs were dangling over the confines of his bed.

He wasn’t even cold. Unlike any winter morning in Brooklyn, the temperature was perfect.

If this was a dream, Tony never wanted it to end. He kept his eyes fastidiously closed, luxuriating in the firm mattress, the plush bedding, and the wonderful smell of clean linens for as long as he could.

There was an unusual series of sounds and shuffling, suspiciously similar to opening doors and approaching feet. “Awaken, sweet lamb!” a happy voice called to him in words that were not spoken in English, but were still somehow intelligible to Tony’s sleepy-happy mind.

“Non pas encore,” he complained and hugged the pillows and blankets desperately closer. He knew he had no business in heaven, but that didn’t mean he was willing to leave just yet.

“Oui, monsieur,” another voice insisted with a tinkling laugh, and his blanket started to be pulled away from him from various directions. His dream was increasingly becoming too real, too visceral; finally, he opened his eyes to face the music.

His heavenly bed didn’t disappear, and neither did the beautiful French maids tugging at his covers. Tony’s jaw practically unhinged at the sight of them and their generous hourglass figures, their bright, playful eyes, and the intoxicating scent of their perfume.

This was wrong—this was wrong in so many ways, Tony couldn’t begin to understand it. The extravagant splendor of the palatial room he had woken up in was more appropriate for the golden age of Versaille; what he was doing there, sleeping in a bed fit for the emperor of France, with two breathtaking nymphs trying to unwrap him first thing in the morning, was beyond his comprehension.

The only thing he did know, without the shadow of a doubt, was that underneath the manyfold blankets and the linens, he was as naked as the day he was born.

“Écoute-moi, mesdames,” he tried to say before they wrenched the covers off him entirely.

“Oh, so _now_ we are ladies?” he heard one of them purr, reaching under the blanket to stroke his knee. Tony yelped and jerked away from the unexpected and uninvited touch, though it didn't seem to dissuade her. “Are you nervous, monsieur?”

“Such a brave sacrifice,” the other whispered, and without explanation, released her armful of Tony’s blankets. “And what a grave loss for our sex.”

The young woman softly massaging his knee swept her hand up the inside of his thigh and whispered, “Perhaps, one more… _prestation?_ ”

Tony choked on his own gasp when the maid, without so much as waiting for permission, wrapped her fingers around his half-hard cock, and with a firm, eager hand, started to stroke him to hardness under the covers.

“Une pipe supere final?” the other whispered in a soft, innocent voice, and Tony could only stare in shock and, undeniably, excitement as they converged on him on their knees, and with all the grace of expertise, pushed aside the blankets until his flushed, hard cock was revealed. “Un souvenir,” he felt more than he heard one of them breathe, but there were at least three hands over his cock and thighs, and a warm, loving mouth lavishing one of his nipples, and who could blame him then for letting his thighs relax and fall open to them, because this, this was a dream nobody would ever take from him.

Doors were thrown open with a terrible thunder, and over it all he heard an irate woman shouting his name.

The maids flew out of the bed and tossed the blankets over Tony again, and they had just barely righted their clothes when a tall, unhappy looking woman swept into the bedroom with a most unpleasant glower.

“Where is my son!” she demanded. “ _Le Capitaine_ has been waiting for nearly ten minutes. If that runt is not made ready for his betrothed this instance, you will be relieved of your stations forthwith.”

Tony did not dare poke his head out of the mountain of blankets the maids had hid him under, but even accounting for the foreign language, he could not recognize the woman’s voice. That was not the mother he once knew; could this be a trick played on him by his subconscious?

The maids apologised profusely and groveled at the lady’s feet until she finally left. Once she was gone, they rushed to the bed again, this time far less indulgent as they pulled Tony out from under the safety of his blanket nest.

“Your clothes are made ready for you,” one of them told him. “Go! Get dressed now, before she has all our heads: hurry!”

Tony wanted to pause and clarify what, precisely, the maid meant by his ‘mother’ having their heads, but something told him he wouldn’t like the answer. He let his feet guide him through this unbelievably solid dream, touching the gilded edges of doors and the ivory door handles as he passed through his opulent chambers.

Everything felt so real, and the smell of lillies filled the air in a way he had never experienced before. How his subconscious could revive such a visceral landscape around him left him in awe.

When he finally arrived to the room of his clothes - an expansive space he could have fit his and Pepper’s shared apartment in five times over - he easily spotted the clothes laid out for him. He wasn’t entirely sure what they were, except that they were tailored clothing, because where he may have expected pants and shirt, or even something as formal as a three-piece suit, he needed at least an IKEA instruction manual and perhaps two axle wrenches to get into this ten-piece wonder that lay disassembled before him.

Before he had to call one of the maids in for help, one of them came running to him as if instinctively aware of his ignorance. Item for item, she helped him get dressed until the other joined them to fix Tony’s hair, shave away his morning stubble, and douse him with a cologne Tony had never smelled before in his life. Which was to say, it wasn’t Axe.

“So handsome you are,” one of them purred, and Tony nearly jumped when one of them pinched his thigh. “The Captain will be pleased to marry the Viscount of Aquitaine. His money and your title? He will go far. And you, we will continue to take care of you, monsieur. The match is perfect.”

“Your _affrère_ awaits you,” one of the maids told him as they finished, her way of saying he was ready.

They stood there in silence for a moment while Tony privately panicked about what to do next, but thankfully, a harried attendant arrived to demand his presence downstairs, at the personal behest of the Countess.

Tony gawked and gaped as he was led through the outlandish palace, struggling to understand where he had picked up enough creative fiber in his life to put this kind of detailed wealth together in his dreams, until at last, at the foot of the stairs in the middle of a room made entirely of ivory, rubies, and gold, stood a man whose face he would recognize anywhere.

Steve Rogers. His boss.

Tony blurted out his name, but mercifully his shock was unheard as his arrival was officially announced to the room at large.

“I wish to speak with the Viscount,” he heard Steve tell a regal old woman beside him, presumably his mother. “Privately.”

“As you wish,” she promised, and with an elegant gesture, Tony was swept off down the corridor by two attendants.

When the door closed behind Steve and they were left together in private, Tony couldn’t contain himself any longer.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, marching on Steve with all his fear, his confusion, and his frustration. “What are you doing here! You boss me around all day until I go home to work my ass off for your damn company until I fall asleep, all without a cent of overtime, and now you’re in my fucking dreams, too? Well, you can’t have it! You can’t have me in bed, that is _my time_ —”

Steve clapped his hands right in front of Tony’s nose, snapping him out of it with the sudden shock.

“This is _not_ a dream,” Steve hissed at him, trying to keep his voice down, but far too angry and afraid to dare raise his voice. “I’ve already been stabbed by my fencing partner today: I’m bleeding, it hurts. They’ve brought me here to marry you,” he added, as if it was equally horrifying. “Stark, what did you do?”

“Oh, so now this is my fault?” Tony snapped, still unwilling to accept Steve’s rationale. “You think I brought us to medieval France somehow to get gay married? You think that’s how desperate I am for dick? Let me let you in on a little secret, _Captain:_ no man with a face like mine, and an ass this good, is ever desperate for a good fuck.”

“And that’s the kind of pep talk I can’t wait to promote within my company,” Steve snarled back, much to Tony’s chagrin. But even as Tony opened his mouth to tell Steve where he could shove his pep talks, Steve said, “Stark, we need to get back home. Today. What do we do?”

Tony rolled his eyes and muttered, “Aren’t you supposed to be the man with the plan?”

“Stark,” Steve tried again, visibly grinding his teeth against his irritation as he tried to express just how dire their circumstances were. “I’m marrying you tonight, and tomorrow, I go to war. Do you understand what that means?”

Tony blinked up at him, trying to puzzle it out. Eventually, he asked, “Will we have to consummate?”

“What.”

“If you’re going to die anyway,” Tony reasoned, “I’m the only one who’ll know, right? I can just say we consummated. Don’t worry,” he added, when Steve opened his mouth to say something. “I’ll tell people you were fine—what should we say, five inches? Six? Forget it: I’ll embellish, don’t worry,” he decided in the end.

“This is serious, Stark,” Steve tried to say again, enunciating each word with great force. “We need to get out of here.”

“Fine by me,” Tony agreed, shrugging out of Steve’s personal space and marching to the door. He threw the doors open and turned to face Steve one last time.

“No! Stark, don’t—”

“You know what the best thing about dreams are, _boss?_ ” Tony asked rhetorically. “You can say whatever the fuck you want, and there won’t be any consequences in the real world. And after two years of working my ass off for your company, helping you through every goddamn technical nightmare imaginable for nothing but nickels and dimes, all I’ve ever wanted was to have this chance to say, screw you, Rogers. To hell with you, and the horse you rode in on!”

“Shameful child!”

Tony’s expression quirked in confusion and he turned around, slowly, to see the woman who would be his mother standing in the middle of the grand foyer, aiming a pistol at him.

“Without him we are to be destitute! This is how you repay my motherhood?” she demanded, and from somewhere behind him, Tony could hear Steve’s feet moving, could hear him shouting something in protest, but it was too late.

His world narrowed down to the flying bullet as it cut through time and space until fatefully piercing his silk doublet. He could feel the clawing pain and heat as the bullet tore through his body, puncturing his lung, and spilling his blood.

Tony collapsed into two strong arms that came around to cradle his numb body, and soft words promising that he would make it, that he would be okay, washed over him as his eyes rolled back into his head, and the light vanished from the world.

***

When Tony next opened his eyes, there were bright lights shining at him in the darkness. His first thought was that, wherever he was, it was a little cooler than he expected Hell to feel like.

“Mr. Stark, when you’re ready,” the patient voice of an old man said from the darkness, and Tony blinked at the light in confusion. He couldn’t make out where the voice was coming from exactly, and it was only in painful gradients that outlines of the world around him started to make themselves known. A chaise lounge to his left; a stool to his right.

Like before, he was naked.

“Are you ready to begin?”

He turned where he stood, trying to find who was addressing him. Then, almost as if he had been given his eyesight again, his vision adjusted to the light, and he could vaguely make out the outlines and faces of people, partially concealed by their easels and canvases.

“Mr. Stark, if you could rest your arm on the stool, and rest your weight against it,” the voice instructed from a distance, and Tony blinked once, twice, before doing as he was told. “Excellent, thank you. Cross your feet at the ankles, also; turn your right foot out—perfect, please hold this position then. Class? You have forty-five minutes. Good luck.”

From somewhere to Tony’s left, he heard someone take a sharp intake of breath and, instinctively, turned to see who it was.

Steve Rogers. He was perched on a stool behind his easel with a piece of charcoal poised between his fingers, staring openly at Tony.

“Mr. Stark! You cannot move!”

“Right—sorry, boss,” Tony told the disembodied voice without looking away from Steve. Less than two yards away, he watched Steve squirm at Tony’s standard reply.

In their world, in reality—whatever this was—Steve was the boss. Tony spoke those words to Steve multiple times on a daily basis without effect, yet now, to hear those words spoke by Tony, nude and in the spotlight, close enough to touch, seemed to elicit an entirely new response from his boss.

It was odd, Tony thought, how long Steve just sat and watched him. His gaze was hot with promise, and inexplicably possessive as it swept over Tony’s hair, the strong line of his neck down to his shoulders, and further down still.

There was no need to guess when (or _whether_ ) Steve would be brave enough to take in all of him. Even with the advantage of being fully dressed, a blush rose so fiercely and so quickly from under Steve’s collar that Tony could make out the precise moment that Steve’s gaze dropped to the neighborhood of explicit content.

And then, Steve picked up his charcoal. At first, Tony was half convinced that Steve was just scribbling on the paper to appear busy: a cover for continued ogling. But the movement of his hands were confident and controlled, and he only glanced Tony’s way now every now and then, as if to remind himself of a certain plane of light, or a striking angle of his pose.

With Steve’s concentration between them, inexplicably, the tables were turned. Tony felt the voyeur, the spectator, basking in the seductive sight of his boss bowed to a task, with all of his considerable intelligence, his incomparable determination, focused on nothing but Tony himself.

They were nearly halfway through the class when Tony started to feel a certain problem making itself known. It wasn’t long until his audience, too, seemed to notice. Soft murmurs and barely-contained giggling spread through the art students, but the way Tony’s face was turned, he could only see Steve. Steve, who bit his lip and paused his work to shamelessly watch Tony’s flaccid cock growing heavy and thick with interest, until it was soon half-hard against his thigh.

Before the whole situation got out of control, Tony closed his eyes and tried to remind himself of all the grief his unforgivably handsome and talented boss had been responsible for only in the past year. Ignoring Tony’s requests for assignments and denying his promotion were at the top of the list. Tony was good for more than a technical assistant you only pull out of the utility closet whenever there’s a problem to be patched up.

With his eyes closed, and the long-standing feelings about his boss on his mind again, Tony could feel himself regain his composure. Confident in his own control, he opened his eyes again to focus on what was important: understanding where they were.

The classroom was classic, old in a way old universities typically were in an effort to maintain authenticity. The clock on the wall was standard analog, and also unhelpful. But even without turning his face, Tony noticed a suspicious absence of cell phones and tablets.

There were no plastic bags or hipster canvas bags anywhere in sight for the art students’ supplies. Instead, metal and wooden baskets with lids, not unlike smaller picnic baskets, were seen beside nearly every easel, alongside small stacks of books and notepads held together by belts or rope.

They were far from medieval France, but they were still worlds away from their time.

Tony was still puzzling at the insanity of his life, and what the implications of this new context might be, when the disembodied voice of the teacher finally called for the students to wrap up their pieces as the class was coming to an end. It wasn’t long before the teacher emerged from wherever he had been lounging out of Tony’s field of vision to thank him and give him a handful of cash in exchange for his hours work; kindly, he also picked up the robe that had been folded neatly behind Tony on a chair so that he could cover up.

The instructor and the students filed out easily, merrily getting along with whatever else they had going on in their lives, until it was Steve who had to come up and quietly call Tony’s name to get his attention.

“Stark?”

“Look at this,” Tony told him with a quiet quiver in his voice. “Do you see it?”

Steve paused at Tony’s unusual tone, then reached out to take the dollar bill Tony was holding out for him. It was perfectly recognizable, albeit a little darker in color, and a little disproportionate compared to modern bills.

“Do you see it?” Tony asked again.

Steve glanced up at him, then with a determined expression looked down at the bill again.

“Is it funny money?” he asked.

“No,” Tony whispered, trying to stay calm. “It says United States Note,” he explained then, pointing to the words typed at the top center of the dollar bill. “And there, under Washington? _'Will Pay to the Bearer on Demand'_?”

“We’re still on the Gold Standard,” Steve realized, staring up at Tony with an expression similar to what Tony was feeling. “Or—or, or not long after it. Twenty years, maybe, thirty tops—that would put us, what, in the 1950s?”

“We need a newspaper,” Tony decided, and after finding Tony’s tidily folded clothes so he could wear something besides a robe, they rushed out of the room with Tony’s hard-earned money to get some answers.

They grabbed the day’s edition of the New York Times and hustled into the alleyway to gawk in relative privacy.

“April 14, 1937,” Steve read slowly, as if hearing it out loud would help him accept the shock faster.

“It’s a wonder anyone could read this,” Tony muttered, squinting at the tiny print and shoe-horned columns. “All the news that’s fit to print, my ass.”

“What the fuck are we doing in 1937!” Steve demanded, looking like he was about to strangle the newspaper. “We—we have—oh, my god,” he suddenly realized, staring at Tony with wide-eyes. “Tony, World War II. Pearl Harbor. It hasn’t happened—all those lives, they’re—they’re alive. We have to—”

Tony snatched the newspaper out of Steve’s hands, rolled it up, and smacked him once—then three more times—on the arm for even thinking those words. “Ray! Brad! Bury! _No!_ ”

“Stop—ow, Stark! Stop it!” Steve snapped and grabbed for the rolled up newspaper to jerk it out of Tony’s hands, raising it in threat to hit him back if Tony dared continue. “This isn’t a goddamn book, these are real human lives. They have families!”

“We are not messing with the fucking timeline! Rule one of time travel! The only rule of time travel,” he added, cause really, what else was there? “Without Pearl Harbor, there’d be no incentive for America entering the War. Is that what you want, Rogers? Do you want Hitler to win?”

“God damnit,” Steve sighed, hiding his face in his hands. Tony tried to ignore it and give Steve a moment to recover, but when Rogers only seemed to shrink even further into himself, Tony reached out to awkwardly pat him on the shoulder.

“Hey… hey, it’s okay. I get it,” Tony said quietly, continuing to give him stiff, awkward pats on the bicep. “Uh, wow, you must work out—um, I mean, your heart is in the right place, Rogers.”

But Steve couldn’t move, let alone speak.

“Hey, come on, big guy,” Tony murmured, then on instinct he stepped forward, however awkwardly, to wrap his arms around Steve’s huddled body, pulling him into a tight embrace. “It’s okay, Steve, we’ll—we’ll get out of this,” he offered as hollow comfort, “we’ll figure this out and get back to the 21st century, where you can make your millions and yell at me all you like.”

“Christ,” Steve blubbered into Tony’s shoulder, though he easily let Tony take his weight. “Is that how you see me?”

“You’re the boss,” Tony offered as comfort, rubbing his hand across Steve’s shoulders to warm him up. Little by little, it seemed to help, and finally Steve nodded his head in a silent expression of gratitude before stepping back.

“Come on. You’ve got a great head for game plans, Rogers,” Tony reminded him, “We have to work together. I can’t do this without you.”

“I’m okay,” Steve whispered unevenly, “I’m—it’s okay.”

“Yeah?” Tony asked in a soft voice, “you good?”

“I, uh,” Steve said, then cleared his throat. “Okay, alright. Pockets,” he decided with a sudden rush of lucidity, patting down his own pant and shirt pockets. “Empty your pockets.”

Tony had already dressed himself not twenty minutes earlier, and knew precisely where everything was: a wallet in his front right pocket, the change for the paper, and a cotton handkerchief that had seen cleaner days. That, he didn’t want to think about. He opened his wallet and went straight for his ID.

“458 West 141 Street,” he read off his license. “What’s that, Upper Manhattan?”

“Harlem, I think,” Steve said absently as he looked through his own wallet. “I, uh. I don’t have identification. Just a receipt... 87 cents for charcoal?”

Tony frowned to himself, trying to rationalize why a grown person wouldn’t have identification. “You’re a student… don’t they need IDs?”

“Maybe I have a locker, or a desk?”

“Maybe, sure,” Tony agreed, because it was as reasonable as anything else. “So, your ID first. Then my… apartment? Room. Whatever.”

“We’ll be faster if we split up,” Steve said, and he fished a pencil out from between the books he’d been carrying to scribble down Tony’s address on the newspaper. “Go to the apartment, see what you can find. I’ll meet you there.”

They agreed on a contingency plan before splitting up, and then Steve took off in a half-run back to the school. Tony hung back for a handful of seconds before following him out of the alley a little more casually.

“What we got here, little man?”

Tony staggered backwards as four men blocked his path and shoved him back into the alley. “I beg your pardon,” he tried to say and slip away, but there were too many hands in his way.

“You don’t got any business on our block, faggot. You hear me?”

“Okay, wow,” blurted out before without thinking. “There is _so much_ wrong with what you just said.”

“Then let’s clear it up,” one of them said casually, flicking open a switchblade easy as breathing. “We’ll take care of everything that’s… _wrong_ right here. Right now.”

***

“Tony? Tony, wake up!”

Tony shot up in bed with a start, clutching at the blanket with the desperation of a drowning man reaching for a lifeline.

Steve had him by the threads of his t-shirt, all but shaking him like a ragdoll. At least he was wearing clothes this time. “Open your damn eyes, Tony. Look at me!”

“I’m awake! I’m—let me go!” Tony cried, smacking at any part of Steve’s person he could reach. “Rogers, get your fucking hands off of me!”

But instead of releasing Tony, Steve pulled him into a clutching embrace. Tony choked softly, struggling to breathe.

“Hey—hey, Steve, what’s—what’s this? What’s going on?”

Steve rumbled at the absurdity of the question, and he sat back on Tony’s bunk bed so he could see Tony’s face. “What’s going—you _died_!” Steve all but shouted at him. “Do you understand what that means?”

“I—no?” Tony replied hesitantly, giving Steve a crazy, side-long look. “Is that me being self-absorbed? Worrying about myself when it is _me_ who keeps dying? Why don’t you tell me, Steve: how hard is it for you when _I_ die?”

“I, it...” Steve started to say, but his argument seemed to deflate before he even had a chance to express it. “I didn’t mean it like that. But when you die, Tony, the world, it loses… it’s no longer alive, but I am,” he finally said. “Everything… everything is less. Less vibrant, less alive. It’s not just being alone, but being alone knowing something is always missing.”

Tony stared at him in disbelief. A part of him wanted to shuffle back, remind himself of all the times Steve had held him back at work, kept him on as a lowly assistant; but what Steve was describing was somehow so familiar that a dark, selfish part of him dared to hope it was true.

“I wasn’t there, but I knew the moment that it happened,” Steve whispered, “like I knew when the bullet had killed you before you stopped talking. But I don’t die because you do, Tony. I keep living. Without you.”

“I don’t get it,” Tony said after a stretch of silence. “You don’t even like me.”

“You know what I was doing the day before…” Steve rolled his eyes at himself even as he said, “medieval France?”

“No?”

“I was talking to my therapist about you,” Steve admitted, shrugging his shoulders self-consciously. “You have so many incredible talents, you’re one of the most intelligent people I know.”

“...I am?”

“You know you are,” Steve told him in monotone. “You—I’d do anything to have you as an associate in the company, but you—you frustrate people, you patronize them. Alienate them. Whether you realize it or not, you don’t always play well with others. I’ve been trying to keep you close to me so nobody files a complaint. I don’t want to lose you, Tony. I can’t. Not now: not again.”

Tony frowned a little to himself, struggling despite his best efforts to follow Steve’s line of thought. “And… that’s what you were talking to your therapist about?”

“I told him I was afraid of losing you,” Steve confessed wryly. “Guess I didn’t realize how good I had it when it was just the thought of another company poaching you.”

“Steve?”

Steve frowned to himself, gathering himself before daring to look up at Tony.

“Steve, we’ve got a lot to talk about, because this is some dysfunctional shit,” Tony said as calmly as he could, “but… we’re not back in our world, are we?”

“We are not,” Steve confirmed.

“Post-Stonewall?”

“It’s 1998,” Steve told him with a little smile. “We’re in New York.”

“New York, 1998?” Tony repeated slowly, then with a sudden realization he perked up with a huge smile. “Oh! Oh, _shit_. Steve! Do you know what that means? Microsoft! Apple! Disney, for god’s sake—”

Steve couldn’t help but smile to himself, charmed despite himself. “Whatever happened to Ray Bradbury?”

“Fuck Ray Bradbury!”

“I’d rather not,” Steve confessed. “Come on, Tony. You were right: we need to get back to our life.”

“Alright,” Tony muttered, though he deflated a little at the thought of missing out on that potential fortune. “Alright, fine. Where are we?”

“12th precinct, Manhattan. We’re detectives,” Steve explained, unclipping the badge from his belt to show him. “According to the Captain, you’ve been napping for the past twenty minutes.”

“Why do you keep getting here before I do?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said after a beat, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. “I was thinking it was because you died. But then, I keep living for… well. A while.”

“Hey, Steve,” Tony interrupted him, albeit a little distracted as he seemed to still be finishing his own thoughts. “How old is your therapist?”

Steve blinked at him, struggling to think of an answer. “Fifty? Forty-five to fifty, maybe? How come?”

“Well… we’re only twenty years from our time, and we’re in New York. You think there’s a chance we might find her? Or him?”

“Him. In residency, probably? You think he could help us?”

Tony shrugged a little helplessly at the question. “I don’t know if he can, but I’ve already died twice, I’m willing to try anything here.”

Try as he might, Steve couldn’t smother his grin fast enough. “It’s worth a shot. Alright, it should be easy to find someone, we’re detectives. Let’s find Dr. Strange.”

The world felt numb around his ears as he absorbed Steve’s words, but it took some time before Tony could even manage to respond.

“Son of a bitch,” Tony growled under his breath, and with a sudden burst of energy, Tony scrambled to get out of the bunk bed to get his clothes and gear in order. “Let’s go!”

Steve sat up in alarm, worried that he’d somehow missed whatever important puzzle piece that Tony clearly felt was crucial. “Tony—what?”

“There’s no way that’s a coincidence! You talking to Strange? _Steve,_ ” Tony all but flailed in his shot of excitement as he struggled to get into his shoulder holster. “Dr. Strange is my fucking shrink, too. When I complained to him about you, you know what he said to me? That it would take magic to get honesty out of a businessman like you.”

Steve, somehow, wasn’t as convinced. “Magic?”

“How else would you explain all this!” Tony demanded, holstering his weapons before darting out of the room. Steve hurried to follow, even going as far as to double check he had a full clip in his SIG as he followed Tony out to their desks. It wasn’t a thought he had ever had before in his own life, but it seemed that now it was instinct.

“Hey, Tony, wait up. Where are you going?”

“Oh, it’s _Tony_ now?” Bucky teased smugly from his own desk, and across from him, Sam snickered in kind. But Tony, ever so rational, elected to ignore the two idiots this time and instead he shoved Sam aside to commandeer his submarine of a computer.

Except, he had nowhere to go (and, oh, god, he was back in the eternal nightmare that was dial-up).

“Where’s Google?” he asked Sam, when the computer wouldn’t do what he wanted it to do.

“What’s that?”

“Goog—a search engine? Any search engine,” Tony said, trying not to get too snippy. “I need to find someone.”

“Dr. Stephen Strange,” Steve clarified before they wasted any time asking.

“What the hell kind of name is that for a doctor?” Bucky scoffed at the same time as Sam hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the cage. “You could put in a request with the Cage. They’ll pull it, if they’ve got it.”

“Fuck,” Tony glowered under his breath and dropped into his desk chair. Steve rubbed at his shoulder gently, trying to be encouraging. Even Sam sat up in concern.

“What’s wrong, man? We’ve used the Cage forever, what’s different this time?”

“It’s urgent,” Steve tried to explain. “We need to find him now. There are some questions he needs to answer for us.”

“For a case,” Tony added just in case, because that’s what people said on TV in their century.

“Right, yeah,” Steve agreed with a nervous cough. “He studied at Columbia, he might be in residency now?”

“Say we help you...” Bucky wondered a little too casually. “Would there be something in it for us?”

Tony picked his head up off the desk and looked up at Steve in question; Steve shrugged a little in reply, as if to agree.

“Would fifty bucks make it interesting?” Tony replied with a similarly feigned detachment.

Sam hummed quietly to himself, then glanced at Bucky before answering for them both.

“Make that fifty each, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“If he’s in the City, we’ll find him.” Bucky seconded. “We’ll make him sing like a little bird, any song you’d like.”

Steve and Tony exchanged smug looks of amusement. “Not if we find him first.”

***

“How are we going to pay them if they win?” Tony grumbled as Steve thumbed through the yellow pages. “They probably will win: we know 2018 New York, not 1998 New York!”

“A little louder, Tony,” Steve said under his breath, “I don’t think they heard you in Brooklyn.”

“What are we even doing here!” Tony shouted in reply, but instead of making some dramatic exit, he glowered all the way back to Steve’s desk to see what he was looking up over his shoulder. “Steve?” he asked more quietly, a little concerned. “You need a hospital?”

“He did his residency in Presbyterian,” Steve explained, double checking the number and picking up the phone—an honest to god landline—to call the hospital switchboard. “I think it’s more likely he’s moved through his education to—yes, hello? Hi, I’m calling from the Office of the Registrar at Columbia University, I need to speak with Stephen Strange about an issue with his—his—”

“Leeches.”

“—his records,” Steve finished slowly while glaring at Tony’s self-satisfied, giggling self. “I see, yeah. Alright. Yes, thank you. Yes, the matter is fairly urgent, if you could ask him to call us back as soon as he’s back,” he said patiently, but he started snapping his fingers at Tony to rush him into action. Tony stalled for a moment to follow, but as soon as he did, he hopped on top of Steve’s desk to reach the little stack of business cards for Steve. “The number is 802-5100. Yeah, 212. Alright, goodbye.”

“He wasn’t there,” Tony concluded as soon as Steve hung up.

“Really, Tony? Leeches?” Steve demanded, and Tony’s face lit up again with delight. Steve rolled his eyes and slowly shook his head, determined not to return Tony’s smile this time, and instead he summarized his conversation. “His rotation begins at three today, it’s the night shift.”

Tony glanced at his watch. “We’ve got 90 minutes, give or take,” he said quietly, trying to remember where the hell Presbyterian was. “Cab it?”

“Tony, we’re cops,” Steve reminded him. It only took Tony a second to catch up.

“The Crown Vic!” he hissed with a rush of excitement, then immediately grabbed his suit jacket and glasses. “I’m driving,” he decided, “and we ain’t stopping for shit.”

Between the two of them, it took an hour to round up their car keys, badges, and track down their assigned car. There, they reached a compromise: Steve would drive, and Tony would control the siren.

They didn’t stop for a single traffic light or stop sign the whole way to the hospital.

“Just, park it in the red,” Tony complained after Steve took a second turn around the block looking for parking. “Nobody’s giving a cop a ticket. We don’t even live here!” he added impatiently, because really, what did they have to worry about?

“You don’t know that,” Steve answered in a grim tone, but he pulled up to the curb in a red zone. “What if this doesn’t work, Tony? What if we’re stuck here?”

Tony glanced down at his cheap tie and the polished badge hanging around his neck. “In 1998?” he asked quietly. “With you?”

“With me, in 1998,” Steve confirmed, watching him patiently. Tony took his time, all but scratching his head until he couldn’t help but shrug a little.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he admitted. “It’s… I mean, at least in this world, maybe we can do good. As detectives.”

“We?”

“Is that weird?” Tony asked with an attempt at wry nonchalance, but he was too uneasy to maintain eye-contact. He glance down at his badge again, fiddling with it nervously. “You being my boss, I mean. Back in the future.”

“I don’t care,” Steve answered with the kind of confidence and surety that Tony hadn’t yet mustered. He frowned to himself, and he looked up at Steve skeptically, half expecting him to be kidding.

“Some things are more important,” Steve told him, as if it was some old adage everyone was aware of but Tony. “Every time we’ve split up so far, it’s… you die. Maybe it was weird, then, but now? I don’t… it’s not right without you.”

Tony watched him in mild shock, as if he had expected Steve to forget everything he had said when Tony first woke up in this life. “You… you mean it?”

“Tony, you don’t have to feel the same as I do,” Steve said with slow, patient words. “But I know what I want: I want you to be alive, safe, and happy.”

A few silent beats passed between them, so heavy with sincerity and feelings that Tony almost started to break out in hives. But for all his efforts and all his history of creating distance between himself and others, he couldn’t bring himself to push Steve away.

“Even if I get some Apple stock?” he whispered with a hesitant but hopeful grin.

Steve rolled his eyes and mumbled something to himself. “Alright, fine. Even if you get some Apple stock.”

“And you’ll get some, too?”

“And I’ll get some, too,” Steve echoed with a quiet sigh. “Hell, why not? If we’re stuck here anyway.”

“God. Keep that up, and I think I might even like you,” Tony said with a smirk so contagious Steve had to hide his smile behind a hand and climb out of the car before Tony caught him.

Tony climbed out and sauntered down the street next to Steve, who was clearly thinking too hard to walk away too quickly.

“What’s on your mind?” Tony wondered, hiding behind his dark sunglasses even in the overcast Manhattan afternoon. “He should be here, it’s five past three.”

“This place is huge,” Steve muttered, “what are we going to do, just flash our badges and demand to be taken to him?”

“No, of course not,” Tony snorted at the absurdity of Steve’s plan. “We’re going to flash our badges and demand he be brought to us.”

***

When Stephen Strange was finally brought into the little office Steve and Tony had commandeered for their purposes, he looked anything but impressed. “Who are you?”

“Oh, shit,” Tony muttered to himself. “What are you, part lizard?”

“We need to speak with you,” Steve explained without so much as glancing at Tony or acknowledging his outburst. “It’s… about a delicate situation.”

“Chlamydia?” Strange guessed, looking from one to the other. “I’m guessing it’s you,” he added, looking at Tony. “It’s not rocket science, boys: wrap it up, every time.”

“Nothing like that—”

“You sent us into the past, asshole,” Tony glowered with a new and dangerous level of impatience. “Undo your hocus pocus bullshit so we can go home.”

“You think I did what?”

Steve put a gentling hand on Tony’s shoulder, and held his gaze for long enough that Tony understood he had to stay calm. When he seemed sure Tony would comply, Steve turned his attention back to Strange. “We’re from 2018. You are our shrink—not _our_ shrink, but you individually,” Steve tried to explain. “I don’t know how, and I don’t really care, but the future you sent us back in time, and we need you to undo it.”

Strange looked from one to the other again, maintaining the kind of poker face Tony would have dreamed of performing at the poker table.

“And why do you think I would do such a thing?” he asked eventually.

“Would, not could!” Tony pointed out, and this time, Steve pushed so hard on his shoulder that Tony had to sit down in a chair before his knees buckled.

“I don’t know,” Steve said in a sincere answer to the question. “And, like I said, I don’t care.”

“Sure you do,” Strange answered dryly, but when neither Steve or Tony seemed to understand his meaning, he rolled his eyes. “Christ,” he muttered to himself before continuing in a slow, long-suffering voice intended for elementary intelligence. “Obviously it was to teach you something. Try to think it through, carefully. Have you learned your lesson yet?”

“Yeah: get a new shrink,” Tony muttered to himself.

“I need to be more honest,” Steve said then, clearly surprising Tony by remembering his words from earlier. “About how I feel. About Tony.”

Tony looked up at Steve with such a stunned, amazed expression that he momentarily forgot to breathe. Strange, however, seemed anything but impressed.

“Really?” he asked in the silence that followed Steve’s admission. “You’re that dense that I had to send you through time and space just to get you to open up about your feelings?”

A fierce blush of embarrassment overtook Steve at once, and he had to turn away and scrub at the back of his neck. Tony, having been the front row audience to the touching confession and the crass shut down, shot to his feet at once.

“You’re nothing but an arrogant son of a bitch with a superiority complex,” Tony said with a snarl, placing himself between Steve and Strange so Strange wouldn’t have a choice but look at him. “You think it’s funny, playing with people’s lives just because you can? We get it: when we work together, everything is peachy; when we separate, we die. That’s how much smarter and better than us you are, you can’t take five seconds to speak in English? You have to throw us—”

“Say that again.”

“—around space,” Tony finished abruptly at Strange’s words, and both he and Steve turned to look at him more closely. “Say what?” he asked.

“You want us to be together?” Steve guessed, albeit hesitantly.

“Please,” Strange scoffed, as if the fact that he should be invested or care was inherently ludicrous. “I can’t create life, boys. All I did was send you back to places you’ve already been.”

“And, what? We just happened to find each other in all of these lives?” Tony drawled. “Cause that makes sense.”

Strange arched an eyebrow at him that spoke volumes about how tired he was of their obvious ignorance. “Doesn’t it?”

“This is making less and less sense the more you talk,” Steve said with a dangerous rumble in his voice, clearly starting to get impatient himself. “You’re describing something like soulmates, what—”

“Bingo,” Strange raised his voice to be heard over Steve’s rising tirade, and with a simple wave of his hand, he raised a flickering golden circle in front of the two stunned, goggling men, and a heartbeat later, they were swept away from the 20th century.

***

Tony startled awake with such a gasp and an instinctive flinch away from the aggressive shaking of his body that he cracked his head loudly against some kind of solid structure behind him.

“Oh, my god!” Pepper gasped, climbing into Tony’s bed immediately to run her hand over the back of his head to see if he was bleeding. “Oh, my _god_ , Tony, what were you thinking? How’s your vision? Do we need to go to the hospital?”

Through the pain and the fading black spots, Tony blinked his eyes open to the familiar, depressing sight of his shabby old apartment, with his outdated computer sitting on the bookshelf exactly where he left it next to his favorite Pratchett series.

“Tony, can you hear me?” Pepper asked him with even more concern in her voice, clearly under the impression that he had hit his head so hard that he couldn’t hear her anymore. “If you can hear me, I’m going to call an ambulance, we’ll get you help—”

“Pepper! Hey, hey, I’m fine,” he promised, struggling to find the space to turn over onto his back so he could smile at her. “I’m okay, just—I just had a nightmare.”

“You sure?” she asked, running her fingers through his hair over the back of his head again, still looking for any sign of bleeding. “I—well, maybe this isn’t a good time then, I can tell him to go away. Steve Rogers is here,” she explained, before Tony had to ask. “He says he wants to talk to you. Should I tell him to go away?”

“He’s here?” Tony asked breathlessly, blindsided all of a sudden by too many feelings and emotions to know what to make of that statement. “He’s—here? Right?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Pepper asked again, because she was quickly losing confidence in his answer.

“I—stall him,” Tony asked her—begged her—in a rush. “Don’t let him see the apartment.”

From only a few yards away in the living room, they both heard a quiet but distinct _fuck_. Tony slapped a hand over his face and groaned quietly into his palm, while Pepper grimaced a little wince of sympathy.

“He’s in the living room,” Pepper explained a little guiltily. “Sorry, Tony. It felt rude to leave him out in the cold.”

“It’s okay, you’re—thank you, Pep,” he promised her and slowly pushed himself up in his lumpy, sunken, but blissfully familiar bed. Finally, he was _home_. He found his slippers and shuffled out to the living room in his boxers and t-shirt, leaving Pepper to hide in their shared bedroom, pretending to not to eavesdrop.

“Tony, hey,” Steve said with a cautious smile, unable to resist taking in the whole, mussed up morning look Tony was clearly sporting. “I—I’m sorry if it’s a bad time, but I just—I had to know if you were here, too. If, if you were okay.”

“Hm? Yeah,” Tony managed with a yawn, rubbing sleep from his eyes and scratching at his elbow absently. “Yeah, thanks, Steve. I’m good. How, how’re you?”

“Back to me,” Steve replied, though somehow, he sounded more nervous than he had even ten seconds earlier. “I, well. Uh, I could come back, if this is a bad time—”

“What, we’re soulmates but it’s a bad time because I’ve got morning wood?”

“I,” Steve stammered, and before he knew it, his gaze had dropped down to uncharted territory to make a new home for itself. “I… I coffee you, morning?”

Tony bit his lip and tried desperately to contain his smile, but he only managed to look all the goofier for trying, and he peeped in question so he wouldn’t have to open his mouth and release his unhelpful giggle fit.

“Morning, breakfast,” Steve explained unhelpfully. “Would you, sometime, like to have breakfast? With me? And, also coffee.”

“Are you asking if I’d like to have breakfast with you where they serve coffee, or are you asking me to a breakfast and also to a coffee?”

Steve blinked as he carefully listened to the two options. “First,” he replied, after a beat. “For now.”

Tony considered him with care, then glanced around them at the tasteful but obvious collection of Goodwill furniture and housewares that decorated the low-cost, low-quality apartment. “You’re not scared of this?” Tony had to ask, if bluntly. “You’re a millionaire, Steve. You don’t have to do this out of guilt, or… obligation, or whatever.”

“This isn’t guilt, or obligation,” Steve promised, and for the first time since he’d gotten there, he sounded entirely sure of himself. “Tony, if I’m afraid of anything, it’s not even trying to give this a chance. I mean,” he added, momentarily glancing down at his shoes as that familiar blush made itself known again. Tony smiled to himself, inexplicably fond of the way Steve’s obvious self-doubt even as the man dared to stand up straight and look Tony in the eye to ask, “If it’s not an, uh, an act of guilt or some sense of obligation for you?”

“Not on your life,” Tony replied with a smile, taking one, two steps closer to Steve so he could be heard even as he whispered. “Give me ten minutes, and I’ll be all yours.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you ever feel like a Stony chat, [I'm on Tumblr (as shetlandowl)](http://shetlandowl.tumblr.com/) more often than I should be.


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